Working
on it.I had a
weird and wonderful weekend, and it's taking slightly more effort than
usual to plug myself back into the regular routine this morning. (Read
this: it's 10:28 a.m. and I'm still sitting here in my bathrobe,
drinking muddy coffee and writing "thank you/I'm sorry about the
carpeting/please hire me anyway" notes to the people I've interviewed
with recently.) Check back after the caffeine has kicked in ...

It's
true that Saturday night didn't turn out precisely as I had
planned.
*I* was envisioning: Bed Picnic. Just the two of us, camped out on the
bed, surrounded by cheap Chinese food and new library
books, with candles burning and David playing his guitar and a rental
movie in the VCR -- something earnest and
sentimental, maybe -- and the sound of rain outside
the Castle windows.

What I got instead was ...

... a Japanese-language TV
cooking competition. Without subtitles.

That
part is true.

It's
also true that I went into the "Iron Chef" experience, on Saturday
night, without much enthusiasm. (I've been more excited about bladder
infection medication, frankly.) David has been trying to get
me to
watch the Japanese-language TV station ever since my first visit to the
Bay Area. I would feign interest -- "Yeah, I carry
a big bottle of
Kikkoman around in MY purse, too" -- but after a
few minutes my
brain would begin to get that *tilty* feeling again. There
is just something weird about watching anime Wonder
Bread commercials. I've never been a fan of cooking shows,
either ... or game shows, or any sort
of televised macho competition (except for women's figure skating,
maybe). And from everything I'd read, "Iron Chef" was all of these
things ... and less. But a local Bay Area chef was one of the
contestants on Saturday night's show, and there had been a ton of
newspaper/TV/Internet coverage about the competition, and David was
really excited about it ...

...
while I was convinced the evening was doomed.

All
of this is true.

But
what David doesn't mention on his website is that I not only managed to
sit through all fifty-seven minutes of "Iron Chef" without sustaining
any permanent brain damage ...

...
but that I wound up loving
it, instantly and permanently, the way I love all good things that
enter my life through a side-door when I am least expecting them. (Lke
KFC Honey BBQ Chicken. Or Elvis Costello.)

I
was hooked instantly, on the surreal spectacle of the show, on the
energy, on the goofily self-important emcee in his lace and leather
and black gloves ("the Anti Liberace," they called him on one of the
Iron Chef websites). I loved the cavernous set, and the pyrotechnics,
and the frantic camera angles, and the overblown theme music. I loved
the bits of elegantly-fractured English, interspersed throughout the
otherwise incomprehensible play-by-play. I wasn't crazy about the
extreme close-ups of *lobster carnage* ... and I wouldn't have minded
subtitles, at least during the judging portion of the festivities ...
but aside from these minor quibbles, I sat there transfixed. Transported. I was suddenly plunked into a completely
different world.

I
can't even explain it.

David,
of course, was almost unbearably pleased with himself. "You like this!"
he said. "You really really like this!" And since I'm madly in love
with the big goof, and since I don't mind giving him credit when credit
is due, I admitted that yes, he was right ... "Iron Chef" didn't
completely suck, and that he was right some more, and that I was glad
he had forced me to watch it, and that he was right right right, and
that I would probably watch it again sometime, and had I mentioned how
incredibly right he was?